Chapter One: Fleeing breakdowns
The rain tapping on the tin roof of Brad’s Cactus Shack was rare in the New Mexican desert. To Nate, it was the purest music—simple, sweet, undemanding. The kind of sound that helped him forget that his life hadn’t gone as planned.
He’d been dubbed “Would-Be Dr. Woodman” by old classmates, and just “Would’ve Been” by the crueler ones. Nate didn’t argue. He had fled Olympia, Washington three years, five months, and seven days ago—a string of odd numbers that gave him a small, weird comfort. He left after a college breakdown he refused to fully unpack, half chasing change, half running from himself.
Roy, New Mexico, was small and sun-scorched. Perfect for disappearing. Nate sold cactus-themed t-shirts, phone accessories, knockoff DVDs, and novelty trinkets to desert passersby. It was slow work in a slower town, but Brad—his boss and the Shack’s owner—kept the energy weird and welcoming. There was also Sleeve. No one quite knew why Sleeve was always around.
The town had just enough infrastructure to qualify as a town: a gas station, a post office, two bars, and a diner that doubled as a hangover triage center. Nate mostly kept to himself. On rare nights, Brad and Sleeve dragged him out for pie and beers, trying to crack his shell. Most nights, Nate curled up with an old anatomy textbook or tinkered with his ham radio on the porch. Everything was quiet, clockwork, low-stakes.
Until she walked in.
The bell above the Cactus Shack’s door jingled. Nate looked up. A woman stood in the entryway—petite, intense, and staring at him like he owed her something.
“Hello?” she asked, and Nate blinked out of whatever trance he’d been in.
“Oh… uh, hi! Welcome to Brad’s Cactus Shack!” he stammered.
“Yeah. Horses. I need a shirt with horses on it. Got anything like that here?” Her voice was steady but impatient. The type of tone that suggested this wasn’t the first time she’d said it.
“I… we mostly do cactus stuff,” Nate said, shrinking into himself.
“Right. Cactus guy. Anything possibly horse-related?”
Nate felt a twitch at the base of his neck. Before he could sputter further, Brad’s booming voice cut in like a divine intervention.
“We got all kinds of horse things! I’ll show you around, ma’am. Just the weirdest horse shit this side of Santa Fe.”
She followed Brad deeper into the store. Nate exhaled.
Minutes later, she returned to the counter with a horse-themed phone case, a shirt featuring a galloping mare in front of a mesa, and a dusty DVD of Black Beauty.
“So uh… horses, huh?” Nate asked, scanning the items.
“Yup. Horses.”
“I’m kind of an animal lover myself,” he said, bagging her purchases.
She looked him dead in the eyes. “That’s sick.”
The words hit him sideways—flat, emotionless, ambiguous. Was that a compliment? An accusation? He didn’t dare ask. He handed her the bag and watched her walk out, a strange pressure in his chest.
***
That night, rain dotted the windows of his trailer. Nate couldn’t shake the feeling. Something about her stuck. Not beauty, not even intrigue. It was more like dread. A tension. Like she’d stirred something old and buried in him.
***
“Hey,” he called as he left the next day. Brad looked up from inventory.
“Did that weird lady say anything?”
“Such as?”
“I mean… she was weird, right?”
“Maybe a bit of a horse girl.”
Nate pressed his lips together and nodded. It was both nothing and too much.
***
That night, he ate a frozen burrito, fed his rabbit Duck, and watched a documentary about invasive species in Australia. As the credits rolled, his landline rang.
“Hello?”
“Yeah, hi. Is this Nate Woodman?”
“Yeah… who is this?”
“So I was on your roof last night, and there’s a lot of bird shit up there. Just sayin’.”
“You were… on my roof?”
“Yeah. I was looking at Jupiter aligning with the Horsehead Nebula.”
“Jesus. More horse shit,” Nate muttered. “Look, man, just… stay off my roof.”
He hung up.
The porch. The night. The static on the radio. Nate poured another drink.
***
The next day, Brad and Sleeve were laughing about some conspiracy theory when Nate showed up an hour early.
“Sleeve thinks Amazon’s building underground tunnels,” Brad explained.
“It’s true! HOA guy called me and confirmed it!” Sleeve insisted.
“You better hope not,” Nate said, “That’s how they get you. First tunnels, then drone dick surveillance.”
Brad laughed. Nate forced a chuckle but his mind was still fogged from the woman—the tension she left.
And then, at 5:03 p.m., she returned.
She walked straight up to the counter like she hadn’t rattled the earth yesterday.
“Animal fucker,” she said flatly.
“I prefer ‘Cactus Guy.'”
“Cactus Guy it is then.”
She locked eyes with him. Her stare was direct, empty, and alive all at once. It made his skin crawl in a way he didn’t fully hate.
“So what’s with the horses?” he asked.
“What’s with all the cactus?”
“Brad’s thing. I’m into… other stuff.”
“Name two.”
“I studied to be a vet. And I uh… I taxidermy my dead pets. Sell them sometimes.”
He wanted to swallow the words back.
She stared.
“Can I see them?”
“The taxidermy?”
“That’s what I asked.”
“Sure. Yeah. Uh… I live about thirty minutes out of town. I can write it down.”
“You mean your address.”
“Yeah. That.”
He handed it over.
As she walked away to browse, Brad sidled up behind him.
“You get her number?”
Nate froze. “Ah fuck. I didn’t give her mine either.”
“Take the rest of the day off, kid. Just in case she shows up.”
Nate bolted out the door, heart thrashing.
Tonight, things would change.
Chapter Two: Horse Girl, Radio Boy
The drive home felt longer than usual. Nate forgot to time it. The woman — Gabby, he assumed, though she hadn’t said — had burned her way under his skin. He kept replaying her stare, the way she said “animal fucker” with the same emotion most people reserved for commenting on the weather.
By the time he pulled into his dusty drive, night had eaten the horizon. No van. No headlights. Maybe she wasn’t coming.
Maybe that was good.
Maybe he was disappointed.
He sat on the porch with a beer, hands shaking slightly as he tried to breathe the unease out of his body. Duck, his rabbit, got fed. The ham radio sparked and fizzed under his fingers while his eyes stayed locked on the desert road, waiting for nothing and hoping for something.
Four hours passed. Then — headlights.
A silver van rolled up slow. Tinted windows, silent engine. She stepped out like it was the most casual thing in the world, cigarette dangling from her lips.
“This your place?” she asked, exhaling smoke in a line that cut through the stillness.
“Yup. This is it,” Nate said. His voice caught in his throat, but he swallowed it down.
She nodded toward the radio. “What’s that?”
“Ham radio. My grandfather’s. I’ve been restoring it. Still learning, but I’ve almost got it working.”
“Damn. Haven’t heard of those since, like, apocalypse preppers and World War II reenactors.” She smirked, stepping closer.
Nate tried to laugh. “Yeah… just a weird hobby, I guess.”
“You’re kind of a nerd, huh, Cactus?”
“No ‘animal fucker’ this time?”
“Not yet. Depends how tonight goes.”
They locked eyes. He looked away first.
“You gonna show me your taxidermy or what?” she asked, already walking toward the front door.
He opened it for her, muttering something about beer. She didn’t answer. Just walked in.
***
Her eyes scanned the small den like she was casing the place. Nate trailed behind, nervous energy vibrating off him. He handed her a bottle.
“Cozy,” she said, sniffing the air.
“It’s just me and Duck.”
“You named your duck ‘Duck’?”
“It’s a rabbit.”
That made her laugh — a real, unexpected sound. It caught Nate off guard.
She followed him to his room. Duck, black and white and slightly pissed off, hopped in his enclosure. Nate picked him up carefully.
“He bites. But I still love him,” he said.
Gabby took the rabbit in her arms. “He’s cute. Feels like he could kill me, though.”
“He might try.”
For a moment, there was peace. Then:
“Show me the creepy shit.”
He led her to the office.
***
The taxidermy room was dimly lit, all dark wood and clutter. Two desks: one for notes and whiskey, one for work. The closet had been converted into a backlit shrine of death — about fifteen critters posed in tiny dioramas, labeled with names and scenes. Some were funny. Some were mournful. All were intimate.
Gabby picked up a book from the desk.
“Filleting the Flesh: A Morbid Art for Beautiful Bodies, by C.R. Rently,” she read aloud, eyeing him.
“Classic literature,” Nate muttered. “Rently’s… intense.”
“You’re a fuckin’ trip.” She set the book down and picked up the whiskey.
“This any good?”
“Best I’ve got,” he said, grabbing two glasses.
They drank in silence. She didn’t grimace at the burn.
“You always wanted to be a vet?” she asked, softer now.
“I used to. Studied for it. Failed out. Taxidermy helped me process the loss. It’s dumb.”
“Not dumb. Maybe you just… wanted something simpler.”
He looked at her. She looked away.
***
He opened the closet.
Her pupils dilated.
Tiny creatures — squirrels in Victorian garb, raccoons with guitars, a rabbit bandito with a tiny tequila bottle — stared back at them from the shelf. Gabby stepped closer.
“Jesus. You made all this?”
“Every one. The unsold ones I can’t part with. Too personal.”
She read some names aloud. “Devnon Anustart?” She burst out laughing. “That’s fucked.”
“Long story. My ex named that one.”
“This guy’s my favorite,” he said, pointing. “Carlito Cross.”
“The drunk rabbit?”
“He used to break out and crawl into bed with me at night. Woke up with him curled up on my chest. Every morning.”
She turned to him, leaned in, and kissed him.
Just once. Then stepped back like nothing happened.
“Come smoke with me.”
***
They drank and smoked on the porch. Nate accepted a cigarette without thinking.
“You said you don’t smoke,” she said, raising an eyebrow.
“I do now.”
“Cute. You’re evolving.”
“Why Roy?” he asked.
“I like the quiet. The space. People leave me alone out here. In cities, I always feel… wrong.”
Nate nodded.
They didn’t speak much after that. Eventually they ended up on the couch, then the floor, then the bedroom.
***
She made him wear a unicorn shirt. Just the shirt. Psychedelic background. Face of a rainbow horse.
“I’m not kidding,” she said.
He wore it.
When they collapsed into each other, sweaty and dazed and sore, Nate barely remembered his own name. She fell asleep first. He followed, dreaming of stampedes and deserts and blood.
Outside, the desert wind howled softly through the scrub.
Something had begun.
Chapter Three: The Horseycat
Nate woke to the smell of cigarettes and old whiskey. His head pounded. He rolled over and saw Gabby, already dressed, sitting on the edge of the bed, petting Duck.
“You always wake up this early?” she asked without looking at him.
“Not always. Just when my back’s covered in marks from.. that horse whip.”
She cracked a smile but didn’t laugh. Duck twitched in her lap.
“You wanna get breakfast?” he asked, rubbing his eyes.
“No. I’ll bring something for you later instead.”
***
Nate noticed her later on in the morning while at work. There she stood holding a backpack. It sagged heavy in her hands.
Nate took a brief second to admire her strange presence, as if observing an animal in the wild, but eventually she spotted him.
“What’s in there?” Nate asked, already suspicious.
She unzipped it just enough for him to glimpse what looked like fur — and then the stiff, glassy stare of a dead cat, its body stuffed into a grocery bag.
“What the fuck,” he whispered, zipping the bag shut again. “Gabby. What the actual hell is this?”
“It’s a request,” she said, smiling.
“You can’t just… bring dead cats to my work!”
“I thought you could do something with it.”
He blinked. The weight of the situation hit like static behind the eyes.
“I mean, I definitely can, but—”
“Do it,” she said. “Make something for me, Nate.”
It wasn’t a suggestion. She turned on her heel and left. Nate stood there, bag in hand, heart hammering.
***
He stashed the cat in the Shack’s little cooler. All day, he twitched. Jumped at customer greetings. Burned his hand on a microwave burrito. By closing time, he was already halfway out the door.
He didn’t drive home. He flew. The sun bled over the horizon in sickly orange streaks, casting long shadows on the desert floor.
Gabby’s van wasn’t in his driveway.
He hoped she wouldn’t come back.
He hoped she would.
***
That night, Nate opened the backpack again. The cat was stiff. He popped a beer and pulled out his sketchbook.
The drawing came fast. A twisted hybrid. Horse legs, a cat’s torso, equine jaw. There was a wildness in the proportions — too long, too sharp. The mane would be made from tail hair. The eyes? He hadn’t decided yet.
He opened the whiskey and drank until the shame numbed.
At some point, he stepped onto the porch, found the pack of menthols she left behind, and lit one. Then another.
By morning, the pack was empty and the sculpture had shape. The smell of opened flesh and tanning solution hung in the air.
Nate drove to the 24-hour gas station. Bought more smokes. A Coke and a Slim Jim. Drove back in silence.
He couldn’t stop. Something about the work took him out of himself. The way flesh became story. The way death became theater.
***
The next day at the Shack, Brad and Sleeve were in full conspiracy mode again.
Sleeve said he knew a guy who knew a guy. Said the tunnels were for “population filtration.”
“Y’all need hobbies,” Nate muttered.
“Oh, I got hobbies. Blowing shit up. Speaking of,” Brad said, “Dwight’s bringing fireworks later.”
“For the porcelain T-Rexes?” Nate asked.
“You know it.”
The day passed in a blur of old movies and worn-out customers. Nate barely noticed when the bell rang — until he looked up and saw her.
Gabby.
She walked straight to him, no hello, no warning.
“Well hey there, ponyboy.”
She handed him something.
A bottle. Inside: cloudy, milky liquid.
“What the hell is this?”
“A gift. Technically.”
Nate unzipped the top.
It was warm.
“You brought me… horse cum?”
“Collected it myself,” she said proudly.
“You WHAT?”
“I figured it could help with the next piece.”
Nate stared at her.
“You think I’m gonna make a taxidermy monster with a horse dick now?”
“No,” she said. “I think you’re going to help me become one.”
The air left the room. Nate thought he misheard. Gabby just stood there, smiling.
“I don’t follow,” he said, barely above a whisper.
“I want to be a horse.”
“You mean—”
“Not in spirit. Not in dream. I want to become a horse. Fully. You said you were good with anatomy. Surgery. You could help.”
Nate didn’t know whether to laugh, cry, or vomit.
Instead, he said, “We’ll need more whiskey.”
Gabby grinned like a child on Christmas morning.
***
That night, under the stinking desert stars, Nate finished the Horseycat.
A twisted feline equine with hooves and mane and a look in its glass eyes that unsettled even its creator. It was grotesque. It was beautiful.
Gabby kissed him like he had built God from bone.
“You’re incredible,” she whispered.
“You’re insane.”
She only smiled.
***
They burned Nate’s couch in the backyard fire pit.
Drank wine out of the bottle. Took turns throwing scrap into the flames. Gabby danced, barefoot in the ash, cackling.
“You’re free now,” she shouted. “No more comfort. No more normal.”
The fire cracked loud, echoing through the hills. Smoke curled around the stars.
Later, they collapsed together in Nate’s bed. Her skin was covered in soot. His chest still bore the marks from their earlier play — welts in the shape of whip lashes, in the shapes of letters he couldn’t yet read.
“Why horses?” he asked.
She hesitated.
“When I was a kid,” she whispered, “riding them… sometimes… it made me feel things. Accidentally. Then intentionally.”
Nate stared at the ceiling.
“Oh.”
“You think I’m a freak now?”
“I thought that way before,” he said flatly. “But now I’m sure.”
She laughed. So did he.
***
They fell asleep in a mess of wine, dirt, and sweat. Nate dreamed again — this time of hooves. Of stampedes. Of a mouth opening where no mouth should be.
And deep beneath it all: something stirring.
Something hungry.
Chapter Four: Call of the Horsehead
Nate woke in a cold sweat.
Not metaphorically — literally soaked, his sheets damp, breath ragged. It was still dark. Gabby was gone. Duck was thumping in his enclosure.
The room hummed, subtly vibrating like something was drilling through the air from far away. Nate stumbled to the living room. The ham radio was on.
He hadn’t turned it on.
The dial spun slowly, as if guided by invisible hands, sweeping through dead air and static until it landed on a frequency emitting a low, garbled voice:
> “Cactus… Cactus… Cactus…”
It was his name. Not his real name — her name for him.
“Gabby?” he called out, heart climbing into his throat.
No answer. Just static. Then music.
A slow violin screech bled out from the speaker. Discordant. Shaking. Like an orchestra tuning in Hell.
Then: silence.
Nate turned it off. Unplugged it. Threw the whole damn radio in the corner.
***
The next morning, he said nothing to Gabby as she brewed coffee in his kitchen wearing nothing but his oversized t-shirt.
“You alright?” she asked, not looking up.
“Did you touch my radio last night?”
“Nope. Why?”
“It was on. I heard voices.”
She sipped her coffee. “Sounds like your brain’s catching up.”
“Catching up to what?”
Gabby smiled over her mug. “To where we’re headed.”
***
Nate tried to work that day. Tried to stock shelves, count DVD cases, pretend things were normal. Brad picked up on it instantly.
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“Didn’t sleep,” Nate said.
“Nightmares?”
“Something like that.”
“Want some coffee?”
“Whiskey.”
Brad laughed, but Nate wasn’t joking.
Later, Brad pulled him aside.
“You good, man? Really?”
Nate hesitated. He wanted to spill it — the weird gifts, the horse obsession, the radio. But what came out was:
“I think I’m in love with her.”
Brad’s face went slack. “Well… shit. Then yeah. You’re fucked.”
***
That night Gabby was waiting when Nate got home, a fire already burning in the pit out back. She had brought her whip again. And more wine. And a manila folder.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“My plans.”
He opened it. Inside were blueprints — crude sketches of body modifications. Diagrams labeled with her own handwriting:
Equine nasal flare extension
Muzzle shaping via jaw realignment
Tendon elongation for hind gait
Clitoral nerve rerouting for tail pleasure responses
He felt dizzy.
“You want me to build this?”
“With your hands. With your skill. With your heart.”
Nate poured whiskey over the folder. Lit a match.
Gabby didn’t flinch as it burned.
“I want to become,” she whispered, “and you want to make something that matters.”
***
The next day, Nate called out of work. Claimed food poisoning. Brad barely questioned it.
Instead, Nate worked on the radio.
He soldered new parts. Stole more from the Shack. Tried new frequencies. He wanted to contact someone — anyone — who could confirm what he was hearing wasn’t real.
He picked up a signal around 3:42 a.m. A man’s voice:
> “Attention. Microwave radiation breach detected. Seek shelter underground immediately.”
Then: classical music.
The Devil’s Sonata.
Nate dropped the receiver. Outside, thunder cracked. Blood rain — or so he thought — began to splatter the windows in streaks of red. He screamed. No sound came out.
His legs gave way. Equilibrium vanished. The world tilted and spun. Then came the sound.
Horses. Thousands of them. Hooves like gunfire, galloping in circles around the house. The windows shattered. Lightning swallowed the sky. And then—
Darkness.
***
He woke up in his cellar, head bleeding, sprawled across crates of old junk and rusted tools.
He limped upstairs. Cooked eggs. Fed Duck. Drank wine at 9 a.m. Finished the Horseycat’s tail with his hands still trembling.
Gabby knocked that afternoon.
“How you holding up, cowboy?”
“I finished it,” he said.
He led her inside. Pulled off the sheet.
She gasped.
The creature was a nightmare: horse-shaped skull, stitched feline hide, tiny hooves in place of paws. A patch of prickly pear cactus beside it as a flourish.
“It’s beautiful,” she said. “He’s mine now.”
She kissed Nate. A long, deep kiss that made his skin crawl and his stomach turn — not from disgust, but from the awful, gut-wrenching truth that he wanted more.
***
That night they drank. Smoked. Talked about breaking into a local farm to “see” the horses.
“I just want to touch one again,” Gabby whispered.
Nate didn’t believe her.
But he agreed.
Chapter Five: The Barn
They drove out long after the sun dipped below the ridge, when even the crickets had given up. Nate’s hands trembled on the wheel as he flicked his headlights off, the silver van trailing behind.
“Farmer Dockson’s a prick,” he said, more to himself than Gabby. “Doesn’t like trespassers. Carries a shotgun.”
“I won’t be long,” she said. “Just enough time to… reconnect.”
That made Nate’s stomach twist.
He parked half a mile past the farm, right before the cattle gate. They crouched low in the shadows and slipped through the side trail, avoiding the moonlight where they could. The barn loomed ahead — a huge, rectangular silhouette, its loft door hanging crooked like a dead mouth.
Gabby walked faster.
“Wait,” Nate hissed. “Let me check the house first. Lights are off. We got maybe twenty minutes, tops.”
“I don’t need twenty.”
The barn door creaked as they slipped inside. It smelled of hay, old wood, and ammonia — but under it all, the sour tang of something alive. Something primal.
Gabby flicked on her phone light. The beam landed on a massive chestnut stallion.
She gasped. Stepped toward it like it was sacred.
“His name is Scout,” she whispered. “I rode him once. Years ago.”
“You knew this horse?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
Nate watched, rooted to the floor, as she approached the stall. She stroked the horse’s neck, her breathing shallow, eyes glassy.
“Hold this,” she said, pressing a plastic condiment bottle into Nate’s hand.
“What’s—” He glanced at it. “No. No fucking way.”
“Just open it.”
“Gabby—”
She was already reaching beneath the stallion, hands practiced, disturbing. Nate looked away. He opened the bottle. The sound of her hand pumping, the heavy breaths, the sick, almost reverent hush of it all — it turned his blood cold.
A loud neigh cracked through the barn like a gunshot. The bottle filled.
Gabby capped it, tucked it under her coat, and whispered to the horse one last time.
Then she grabbed Nate’s wrist.
“Let’s go.”
They didn’t speak until they were halfway back to the car.
Nate finally found his voice.
“You said we were going to see the horse.”
“I did.”
“You said you just wanted to touch it.”
“I did.”
They got into the van. The silence was suffocating.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” he asked, voice low.
Gabby turned toward him, completely calm. “I need this.”
“For what?”
“To become.”
***
Back at the house, Nate poured himself a double. Sat in silence as Gabby placed the bottle of semen on his taxidermy table like it was some holy relic.
“I can carry them,” she said suddenly.
“What?”
“The offspring. I can carry horse embryos. I’ve done it before. I miscarried. But it was real.”
Nate stared at her, mouth open. Words formed, then died in his throat.
“You’re telling me you… inseminated yourself with horse cum?”
She nodded. “And it worked. For a while.”
He sat down, hard. Poured another drink. Lit a cigarette.
“You realize how insane this sounds, right?”
“I don’t care how it sounds. I care that it means something. That I’m meant for this.”
Nate drained his glass. “You’d have to be a horse.”
“Exactly.”
She grabbed his hands. “And you can help me.”
Nate looked into her eyes.
Something in him cracked.
Not from horror. Not from disbelief.
But from the terrifying recognition that some part of him wanted to help.
That some twisted part of him saw this as art.
He nodded. “I’ll do it.”
“You promise?”
“I promise.”
***
That night, she picked the movie. The House That Jack Built. Fitting.
He didn’t sleep. He sat on the floor facing her as she dozed, her breath soft, her limbs twitching in dreams.
He watched her chest rise and fall. Watched the bottle of horse semen still sitting on the table, catching the flicker of the TV light.
And he thought.
He thought about materials. About binding. About skin.
He thought about surgery.
Chapter Six: The Work
By dawn, Nate had a plan.
It came together in a haze of caffeine, fear, and some deeper hunger he hadn’t named yet. He told himself it was curiosity.
He drove to Las Vegas — Hell, as the locals called it — two hours of desert nothing in every direction. Along the way, he made a list:
Surgical tools
Veterinary sedatives
Plastic sheeting
Restraints
Morphine if possible
Hoof mold kits
Leather straps
Sutures, heavy gauge
He bought what he could from two animal supply stores and a trucker flea market. No questions asked. People in Vegas knew how to mind their own business.
The rest, he ordered online — discreetly. He used a burner card Sleeve once gave him for “emergencies.”
This counted.
***
Back home, Gabby was in the bathtub, fully clothed, humming to herself. She had drawn horses in Sharpie all over the tiles.
Each one had a name.
“I’m naming the herd,” she said, not looking up.
“Alright.”
He cooked. Rice and eggs. She didn’t eat.
Duck didn’t either.
Nate noticed the rabbit’s eyes were glassy. His breathing shallow.
“You okay, little dude?” he asked, kneeling beside the cage.
Duck didn’t move.
Nate reached in. The rabbit flinched — hard.
Claws out.
He scratched Nate’s wrist, hard enough to bleed.
“Jesus!”
Gabby appeared behind him.
“He knows,” she said.
“Knows what?”
“That something’s being born.”
***
That night, Nate dug through his old vet med textbooks.
He studied limb structure. Equine respiratory function. He mapped out muscle clusters, memorized weight ratios. He sketched a human torso over a horse’s skeletal frame and tried to calculate the internal damage each modification would cause.
There was no way she’d survive.
And still, he kept planning.
***
By the end of the week, the kitchen had become a surgical staging area. Knives boiled. Gloves stacked. Rope cut and sorted by thickness.
He went into town twice and didn’t speak a word. Not even to Brad.
Gabby was changing.
She began crawling on all fours in the house, even when it wasn’t a game. Her speech slowed. She started gnawing on things — the leg of the couch, a corner of the wall. She asked Nate to tape her fingers together in threes, to simulate hooves.
He did it.
She cried when she could no longer pick up her lighter.
But she liked the pain.
She began to wear an authentic horse skin she had.
She requested it eventually be grafted onto her as the “New and true skin.”
***
On the eighth night, Nate woke to the sound of screaming.
It wasn’t Gabby.
It was Duck.
High-pitched, continuous. His body shook violently in his cage.
Nate rushed over, trying to calm him, but the rabbit thrashed, smashing itself into the walls of the enclosure again and again until blood painted the plastic.
Then: silence.
Nate stared down.
Duck lay motionless. Blood in his fur. Neck broken.
Gabby appeared behind him.
“Don’t be sad,” she said.
“I loved him.”
“I know. That’s why he had to go. You can’t split your loyalty.”
He looked up at her. Her face was blank. Calm.
But her hands were covered in rabbit fur.
***
Nate buried Duck out back, near the dead couch fire pit.
He didn’t speak the whole time. Gabby stood a few feet away, silent too, like she was waiting for a sermon.
When the dirt was packed down, Nate looked at the sky.
It was bleeding again.
Not rain — not really. But red mist in the air. The moon was pink. The stars blinked too fast.
He didn’t ask if she saw it too.
They went inside.
***
That night, she bled for the first time.
From the scalp.
Nate found her in the bathroom, hunched over the sink, hair matted with dark clots.
She was trying to file down her ears.
“What are you doing!?” he shouted, grabbing the rasp from her hand.
“They’re wrong,” she hissed. “They’re too small.”
“You’ll kill yourself.”
“I’m already dying!” she said. “I’ve been dying since I was born!”
He held her as she wept, her blood soaking into his shirt.
Later, after he bandaged her up, she asked him to tell her a story.
He told her about Duck. About how the rabbit used to run in tight circles when he was excited. About how he once chewed through a power cord and somehow lived.
Gabby smiled.
“Maybe I’ll be reborn as a rabbit.”
“Maybe,” Nate said, but he didn’t mean it.
She wouldn’t be reborn.
She was being built.
***
The next morning, she said it was time.
“I’m ready.”
“For what?”
“For the first incision.”
Nate blinked at her, pale, still holding the coffee mug he hadn’t sipped from.
“We haven’t prepped.”
“You have.”
She led him to the kitchen.
On the table: the blueprint. A new version.
Cleaner. Sharper. Focused only on one change:
The tail.
A surgically implanted tail at the base of her spine.
“I made you a harness mockup,” she said, pulling it from a bag.
It was made of belt straps, duct tape, and horse hair.
“I want the real thing next.”
Nate looked her in the eyes.
They weren’t human anymore.
Chapter Seven: The First Cut
Nate stared at the tail harness.
He turned it over in his hands. The belt was leather, real, probably from one of his own thrifted jackets. The hair looked clean — maybe from the same chestnut stallion. Maybe not. It didn’t matter.
It was the craftsmanship that disturbed him.
Gabby had made it lovingly. She’d taken her time.
“I want the nerves fused,” she said, sitting on the kitchen counter like she hadn’t just dropped a bomb. “Eventually. Once I can move the muscles properly.”
“You want motor control?”
“Yes.”
“That’s… not even remotely possible.”
“It is,” she said. “If you believe in it.”
That made Nate want to scream.
Instead, he set the tail down and walked outside. The heat was unbearable. The wind dry and bitter.
He vomited into the cactus bed. When he turned around, Gabby was there, holding a rag.
“You always gonna be this squeamish?” she asked.
“Only when you talk like God’s whispering in your molars.”
She grinned.
***
They cleaned the tools that night. Rubbing alcohol. Fire. Old surgical habits kicked in. Gabby prepped the bathroom — laid down plastic, sterilized the counters, set up a table lamp with no shade.
She stripped down to nothing.
“Don’t look at me like that,” she said. “I’m not yours.”
“I’m the one cutting you.”
“Exactly.”
She bent over the sink, breathing slow. Nate tied her wrists to the faucet, loosely. Not because she asked. Because she wanted him to. Because some part of her needed a leash to let go.
She bit down on a rolled-up bandana.
He marked the spot: the base of her spine, just above the tailbone.
He paused.
She nodded.
And he made the first cut.
It was deep, but clean. A straight, careful line. Blood welled up in perfect silence.
Gabby didn’t scream. She made a sound like a broken flute — air leaking through splinters.
He worked fast. The tail was pre-stitched to a metal plate — salvaged from an old garden trowel, smoothed down. He fit it under the skin, anchored it between muscle.
Sutures. Five on each side. Double-stitched.
She passed out before he finished.
***
Nate sat on the bathroom floor for hours, just watching her chest rise and fall.
His hands wouldn’t stop shaking.
Not from guilt.
From awe.
***
She woke at sunrise, still bleeding a little. She ran her fingers along the sutures, eyes glazed.
“How’s it look?”
“Like sin,” Nate whispered.
“Good.”
She tried moving the tail.
Nothing.
But she smiled anyway.
“Tomorrow we start sensory integration.”
“We?”
“Yeah. You’re gonna help me feel it.”
***
Over the next few days, things changed fast.
Gabby didn’t wear clothes anymore. Just that thin, tan horse skin she draped over herself like a robe.
She walked differently — more from the hips, knees bent slightly inward, head forward like she was always about to bolt.
She only ate oats and raw carrots.
Nate watched, helpless and hypnotized, as she disappeared.
Every night, she made him test the tail.
He’d stroke it, tug it, flick it with the back of a spoon.
“Anything?”
“Nothing yet.”
But every night, she’d moan.
Not from pain.
From wanting.
***
The town noticed.
Brad pulled Nate aside one morning at the Shack.
“Okay. What’s going on, man?”
“What do you mean?”
“You look like you’ve been up for a week. Sleeve said he saw you buying scalpels and lube in the same purchase. That ain’t normal.”
“It’s for… a project.”
“Yeah? You building a skinless sex doll or something?”
Nate didn’t answer.
Brad grabbed his shoulder. “You in trouble?”
“I’m fine.”
Brad let go. “I hope you know whatever you’re doing — you’ll have to come back from it eventually.”
Nate looked down at his hands. Still stained faintly red around the fingernails.
“I don’t think I will.”
***
That night, Gabby stood naked in the moonlight, silhouetted against the desert. The tail swayed in the breeze. Stiff. Bloody.
“Cut deeper next time,” she said.
“There shouldn’t be a next time.”
“I want hips next. Real ones. Big enough to carry weight. You can do it.”
“You’ll die.”
“I’ll die human. But I’ll be born a horse.”
Nate took a step back.
Gabby smiled, gentle. Not mocking — almost tender.
“You don’t have to understand it. You just have to make it real.”
He looked up at the stars. They blinked in patterns that didn’t make sense. They looked like galloping legs. Like constellations rearranged into hooves.
He looked back at her.
And nodded.
Chapter Eight: The Becoming
They packed in silence.
Gabby had labeled the boxes:
• Tools
• Skins
• Feed
• Bones
• God
Nate didn’t ask.
She loaded the tail carefully, wrapping it in gauze soaked in aloe and whiskey. Her gait had changed — jerky, uneven. The tail was infected, the skin around the sutures a purplish ring. But she didn’t flinch. Not once.
“I found us a place,” she said.
“Where?”
“An old meat locker. Used to be a butcher’s shop. Forty miles south. No neighbors. Cold enough to slow the rot.”
Nate nodded. He’d stopped saying no a long time ago.
***
They drove through the dead stretch of New Mexico where cell service dies and time warps. Gabby rode in the back, curled up on a tarp beside the tools. She was whispering to something in her lap — maybe a bone, maybe her own reflection.
Nate didn’t look back.
The butcher’s place was worse than she described. Half-collapsed, reeking of piss and ammonia. But the generator worked. The locker was intact.
Gabby kissed the bloody doorframe like it was a threshold.
“This is where I’ll be born,” she said.
***
Over the next three days, Nate lost time.
He remembered the first cut on her hip. A long, wide incision to make room for the implants. She’d molded them herself from rebar and fiberglass. He anchored them to her pelvis with twisted wire and screws.
He remembered the screaming.
She hadn’t passed out this time.
Then came the teeth.
She made him pull three of hers — front molars. She wanted room for the prosthetics: large, flat equine caps that clicked together like stones.
They didn’t fit right. Blood pooled in her mouth. She drooled for hours.
***
On the fourth day, Nate found her huffing steam into a trough of oats, completely naked, covered in filth.
“I can feel my gait shifting,” she said. “My balance is different.”
“You have a fever.”
“Good.”
He made her soup. She threw it at the wall.
***
The surgeries continued.
Hoof molds over her feet. Nerve exposure experiments using copper wire. He tried to rig sensors from a broken microwave — she insisted she could feel “something” through them.
“I think it’s working,” she whispered.
Nate didn’t tell her it wasn’t.
***
On the seventh day, her stomach swelled.
He noticed it while cleaning her bandages.
“You look… bloated.”
“I’m not bloated,” she said. “I’m pregnant.”
He dropped the gauze. “That’s not possible.”
“You said yourself, the hormones were viable. That stallion was virile.”
“That doesn’t mean—Gabby, you don’t have a womb that can support equine—”
“It’s not equine,” she said softly. “It’s me.”
Nate stumbled back. “You’re delusional.”
She smiled. “And you’re my doctor.”
***
That night, Nate didn’t sleep.
He watched the walls of the meat locker breathe. The shadows stretched like tendons. The cold didn’t matter anymore. His skin burned.
He tried to journal — to sketch, to think — but every time he put pen to paper, the image he drew was the same: a silhouette of Gabby, standing on four legs, her face long and wrong, her belly full of something that kicked from the inside with hooves.
***
On day ten, the heartbeat became audible.
Nate pressed a stethoscope to her belly. What he heard wasn’t normal. It wasn’t even biological.
It sounded like a gallop.
Steady. Rhythmic. Distant — like thunder coming from inside her.
Gabby purred when he told her.
“He’s coming,” she said.
“It’s not a he. It’s not anything.”
“It’s ours.”
Nate screamed at her then. For the first time. Words he couldn’t remember. Rage he hadn’t allowed himself to feel.
She took it. All of it.
Then she kissed him.
And said, “Make me ready.”
***
The next surgery was the most dangerous yet.
A full leg brace — welded rods over both thighs, locking her knees at a backward angle. She said it would help her walk like a true quadruped.
He warned her it would destroy her tendons. That she’d never stand upright again.
She laughed. “Perfect.”
The operation took six hours. She passed out from blood loss twice.
When she woke, she tried to crawl — knees backwards, spine curved, tail swaying.
She collapsed in a puddle of her own blood and vomit.
But she was smiling.
***
Nate stared at her that night from the doorway of the locker.
She lay on a tarp, arms twitching, belly swollen, breathing like a racehorse mid-sprint.
The wind outside howled like something mourning.
He realized something then: he no longer wanted to stop her.
He wanted to see how far she could go.
Chapter Nine: The Foaling
Gabby’s water broke at 2:46 a.m.
Nate knew the time because he’d been lying awake, counting the seconds between heartbeats. Hers. The thing’s. His own.
She woke with a gasp, eyes wide, hair soaked in sweat. She didn’t scream.
She laughed intensely like some sort of witch.
“It’s happening,” she said, voice shaking. “I can feel him chewing.”
“Chewing?”
She nodded. “My ribs!”
***
The next twelve hours were pain.
Gabby convulsed on the metal table, bones locking and unlocking in ways Nate knew weren’t survivable. Her belly bulged and spasmed like it was full of knives.
The hoof-mimic limbs she’d made scraped at the walls. Her tail whipped, hitting the tray and sending scalpels flying.
She bled from everywhere — mouth, nose, ears, the seams of every incision he’d ever made.
At hour nine, she stopped speaking English.
Mouth still moved. Tongue still flapped. But it was sound without words.
Horse noises. Groans. Squeals.
Snorting.
Whinnying.
***
By the eleventh hour, the thing inside her started pushing.
There was no cervix, no canal. Nate didn’t know what he was delivering.
She reached down to her womb, grinning through broken teeth.
“Pull him out.”
“You’ll die!”
“So what?”
He cried then.
Real tears.
But he obeyed.
***
He cut her open just below the naval, hands slick and shaking. Inside was not a foal. Not a child.
It was a mass.
Slick, pulsing. Covered in soft brown hair and cartilage.
It blinked.
At him.
Gabby screamed something — might have been “Push!” — or maybe just “Praise!”
The thing slipped from her in one long, wet lurch. Nate caught it in a tarp.
It moved.
Not crawling — not exactly. Just… shifting. Rearranging. Like it hadn’t decided what it was yet.
Gabby went limp.
***
He didn’t sew her up right away.
He just stood there, watching this thing breathe on its own.
It was twitching. It had four legs, but one disappeared and came back different every time he looked.
It didn’t cry.
It didn’t whinny.
It hummed.
A deep, low vibration in the air — like a cello string strung through bone.
Then Gabby stirred.
“Is he beautiful?”
Nate hesitated.
“Yes,” he whispered. “He’s perfect.”
She smiled. “Let me see.”
He carried it to her.
Held it above her face.
She gasped in awe.
And it bit her nose clean off.
Her scream woke the desert.
Outside, coyotes howled in chorus. The wind bent sideways. A phone pole collapsed on the road. Somewhere miles away, a horse bucked and shattered its own legs trying to escape its stable.
Inside the locker, Nate yanked the creature away. Blood poured from Gabby’s face.
She didn’t cry.
She laughed.
“It’s alive… it’s alive this time and it’s mine!”
***
He wrapped the creature in bandages and stuffed it in a crate. Nailed it shut. Weighted it down with cement chunks.
He didn’t bury it.
He planted it.
In the sand, behind the butcher shop, under a dead saguaro cactus that had never bloomed.
He wasn’t trying to kill it.
He just wanted to see what it would grow into.
***
Gabby never fully recovered.
Her face was mutilated, her hips shattered. She stopped standing altogether.
But her voice returned.
And so did the humming.
***
She spoke only in whispers now. Stories of her “son.” His dreams. What he was learning. How he was feeding on things deeper than blood.
“He’s a godling,” she told Nate. “Born not from me — but through me.”
“I need to leave,” Nate said one day.
Gabby was on all fours, eating hay. She looked up at him.
“No you don’t.”
“I’m not like you.”
“You are.”
He paused.
Then said, “I buried him.”
“You planted him.”
Silence.
“You’ll come back,” she said. “When the dirt starts to breathe.”
***
Nate left that night. Took his van. Took nothing else.
Drove until the desert vanished behind him. Until the sky lost its red.
Until he could almost pretend none of it had happened.
But three nights later, in a shitty motel outside Flagstaff, he woke to the sound.
A low hum through the mattress.
A gallop under the floorboards.
And in the mirror?
His eyes blinked sideways.
Chapter Ten: The Bloom
The humming never left.
It threaded itself through Nate’s blood like wire, tightened every time he tried to sleep. Every floor became hooves. Every silence carried breath. Every mirror showed something just off — not monstrous, but equine. Longer face. Wider eyes. Teeth too big.
By the fourth day, he was screaming in his sleep.
By the sixth, he started answering the hum, and eating soil, not for the flavor, but because he was compelled too.
***
He returned on a Wednesday, three minutes before dusk.
The butcher shop looked the same. Sagging. Dead. A hole in the roof. But the wind had changed direction. It no longer came through the desert. It came from it.
He stepped out of the van, boots crunching over dried goat bones that hadn’t been there before.
The earth smelled like burnt sugar and hair.
The cactus was blooming.
Blood-red flowers, thick and veined, erupting from the saguaro’s dead ribs.
***
When Nate entered inside the butcher shop, the smell change hit him first.
Not the scorched outside, or expected inside rot — ammonia, copper, bile, something unmistakably infected.
He stepped through the warped doorway with a pistol in one hand and his grandfather’s bone saw in the other. The desert wind howled behind him, like it wanted to stay out of this.
The shop was empty. Quiet. Everything exactly where he left it.
Except the freezer door.
That swung open like a mouth.
***
Gabby lay on the floor, propped against the freezer wall, her body a ruin of stitches, rot, and makeshift bandages soaked in colors that shouldn’t exist.
Her face was half gone — nose bitten off, lips blistered, eyes yellow with fever. Her legs bent the wrong way, still locked in surgical braces. Her arms trembled.
But she was alive.
Barely.
She looked up at Nate.
“You’re late,” she rasped.
“Where is it?” he asked.
Gabby smiled. A single molar fell out onto her chest.
“It found its legs.”
A sound came from the roof — a thump, like a deer landing on rotten wood. Then another.
Nate looked up.
And it dropped in behind him.
It wasn’t a horse.
It wasn’t human.
It was something between — tall, hunched, its legs backward, spine ridged with protruding bone. Its face stretched long, horse-like, but wrong. Teeth like railroad spikes. Eyes glowing faintly, not from light — from within.
The skin was patchwork. Scars and seams. Fur grew in odd places.
It breathed like it remembered drowning.
***
Nate raised the gun.
The creature didn’t flinch.
It moved fast — too fast.
A blur. Hooves hitting tile.
It crushed Nate’s wrist before he could fire. Bit the gun in half.
He screamed.
It grabbed his jaw with two elongated fingers and ripped it open sideways.
Gabby watched, shivering, silent.
Nate gurgled. Blood painted the freezer door. The bone saw clattered to the floor.
The creature leaned down and whispered something into his neck as he died.
No one would ever know what it said.
Then it stood up straight.
And walked out.
***
Gabby dragged herself to the doorway.
She saw the thing moving across the desert — graceful now, galloping wrong-footed across the sand, pausing only to sniff the wind.
It didn’t look back.
It didn’t need to.
She felt it in her teeth — that connection.
She had birthed it. Given it name, body, pain.
Now it belonged to no one.
She laughed once, then choked on blood.
Her legs wouldn’t move anymore.
Her fingers were numb.
She could feel the infection climbing into her bones, setting up camp.
She wouldn’t last long.
But for now, she was alive.
Watching as the proudest thing she had ever created slowly vanished into the distance, Gabby was finally whole.